J is for Jazz 008: KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA

KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA
c 1965

The one, and the most important artist of 1960s Polish jazz, was Krzysztof Komeda.  His role…cannot be explained in merely a few sentences.  Words like: genius, composer, visionary, collaborator and leader cannot fully describe him. How could this talented but not by any means virtuoso pianist with a medical degree make such a great impact?  How could all of the musicians who played with him emphasize what an overwhelming impact his music and his personality made on them?

PolishJazz.com

 

 

 

Post-World War Two Poland may seem an unlikely place for jazz to have flourished, let alone to have produced one of its most internationally acclaimed (not to mention widely influential) superstars.  The fact that Krzysztof Komeda –– who was born Krzysztof Trzcinski in the central western Polish city of Poznan on 27 April 1931 –– began his career as a so-called 'amateur musician,' playing popular tunes in dance bands as a weekend hobby, only makes his achievements in the jazz realm that much more astonishing.  By the time he died in April 1969 Komeda had become the leading figure in the rapidly evolving European jazz movement –– a pianist and bandleader whose alternative career as the composer/arranger and performer of evocative, jazz-tinged soundtracks for iconic 1960s Polish films like Innocent Sorcerers (1960, directed by Andrzej Wajda) and Knife In The Water (1962, directed by Roman Polanski) served as a touchstone for his contemporaries and has remained so for later generations of Polish and international musicians alike.

 

 



MOJA BALLADA [MY BALLAD] (1960) KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA QUARTET


 

 

Trzcinski spent his formative years in the southern central Polish cities of Czestochowa and Ostrow Wielkopolski.  He began to study piano as a child and was admitted to the Poznan Conservatory in 1939, from where it was hoped he would go on to pursue a career as a concert pianist.  Unfortunately, the invasion of Poland by the Nazis in September of that year quickly put an end to this dream.  Although he retained a lifelong fondness for classical compositions –– particularly for the compositions of Bach and Chopin –– Trzcinski was destined to make his mark playing a very different yet equally challenging style of music.

 

After graduating from high school in 1950, where he had been a keen member of the Music and Poetry Club, Trzcinski entered the Poznan Medical Academy, eventually going on to specialize in otolaryngology (better known today as 'ENT' or 'Ear, Nose and Throat' medicine).  While still at high school he had met Witold Kujawski, already a well-known bass player who had become a leader of a new movement which dedicated itself to playing the officially frowned upon 'decadent Western music' better known as jazz.  It was Kujawski who served as his guide to this forbidden 'new' style of music and first took him to Krakow where a tiny underground jazz scene was emerging in deliberate and often dangerous defiance of Poland's rigid new Soviet-backed government.  Banned from playing in public, this was a period –– documented so brilliantly by filmmakers like Wajda and Janusz Morgenstern –– when it was only feasible for jazz musicians to perform in private homes for small gatherings of trusted, hand-picked friends.  It was at one of these same informal music parties, held in the tiny Krakow apartment of Kujawski, that Trzcinski performed this threatening foreign music for the first time with some of Poland's leading jazz musicians, including soprano saxophonist Jerzy Matuszkiewicz.  Fearful that his reputation as a physician might be compromised if he performed under his real name, he also adopted the pseudonym 'Komeda' –– a childhood nickname –– at this time and continued to use it for the rest of his all too brief career.

 

 



ROZMOWY JAZZOWE A short Polish film (12 minutes) featuring  live performances by HOT CLUB MELOMANI and KOMEDA SEXTET


 

 

Between 1951 and 1956 Komeda performed as a member of the Dixieland band Hot Club Melomani, which also featured Kujawski on bass, and in the dance band of Jerzy Grzewinski which, in time, also chose to follow the Dixieland path as the government's oppositional attitude to jazz finally began to soften.  A more tolerant attitude on the part of the Polish Communist Party resulted, in August 1956, in Grzewinski's band being invited to play at Poland's first-ever State-approved jazz festival in the northern city of Sopot.  The band created a sensation but Komeda, who had already fallen under the spell of the 'modern' sound of new North American groups like the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, stole the show with his own Sextet featuring saxophonist Jan Ptaszyn Wroblewski and vibraphonist Jerzy Milian.  

 

Komeda's festival success turned him into a full-time bandleader, one whose moody and sometimes discordant original compositions soon attracted the attention of talented graduates of the Polish Film School like Roman Polanski who, in 1958, asked him to compose the score for his first surviving short film Two Men and A Wardrobe.  Other film work quickly followed, with both Andrzej Wajda –– at that time Poland's most famous and internationally renowned director –– and Janusz Morgenstern asking him to compose soundtracks for their films Innocent Sorcerers (1960) and See You Tomorrow (1960).  In 1968, with his credentials as a composer now firmly established, Komeda created what was perhaps his most evocative and menacing soundtrack for Polanski's debut Hollywood feature Rosemary's Baby.  Film work also allowed him to explore the more experimental side of his nature and led, indirectly, to the composition and recording of his 1962 semi-classical piece Ballet Etudes.  Amazingly, Komeda found time to compose soundtracks for close to seventy films during the decade he was active in this field.

 

The early 1960s saw Komeda continue to consolidate his position as Poland's leading jazz musician with further festival appearances and tours to Scandinavia, Russia and France.  His first Scandinavian tour, which saw him and a new multinational band made up of Polish and Danish musicians impress audiences at Stockholm's Golden Circle Club and Copenhagen's Montmartre Club, also allowed him to make his first non-Polish recordings for the Swedish label Metronome.  He also participated in Jazz and Poetry, a widely watched TV program which featured his originally composed accompaniments to the work of State approved, Nobel Prize winning poets Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz and others.

 

In 1965 the pianist formed what is now considered to be his greatest, most groundbreaking band.  Known simply as the Komeda Quintet, the group featured future fellow Polish jazz icon Tomasz Stanko on trumpet, Zbigniew Namyslowski on alto saxophone and Danish musicians Guenter Lenz and Rune Carlsson on bass and drums respectively.  It was with this line-up that he recorded the album Astigmatic later that year –– a work described by English critic Stuart Nicholson as '…a bellwether for European jazz…with the emergence of a specific European aesthetic.  In terms of structure (ad hoc song forms that had a lot to do with Komeda's film writing), its improvisational and rhythmic approach, Astigmatic represents a fresh approach and a different way of hearing and playing jazz.'  Unfortunately, the Komeda Quintet only recorded one more album –– Lirik und Jazz, for the German label Electrola, in 1967 –– prior to the 1968 accident which plunged the pianist into the coma that would eventually lead to his death at the age of thirty-seven.

 

 

DAYTIME NIGHTTIME REQUIEM

(aka REQUIEM FOR JOHN COLTRANE)

KOMEDA QUARTET
KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA (piano); TOMASZ STANKO (trumpet); ROMAN DYLAG (bass); RUNE CARLSSON (drums)TV performance 1967



 

 

The precise circumstances of the accident which robbed Komeda of his life at such a young age remain shrouded in mystery to this very day.  Some believe he suffered his fatal brain injury in a car crash, others that he sustained the injury after being pushed off an escarpment during a Hollywood drinking party –– he'd gone to Los Angeles in early 1968 to work with Polanski on the score for Rosemary's Baby –– by Polish writer Marek Hlasko, others still that he stumbled and fell while hiking in the Hollywood Hills.  Whatever the cause, the result was tragically the same.  Comatose and paralyzed, Komeda was taken back to Warsaw by his wife where he died on 23 April 1969 without regaining consciousness.  His funeral at the city's Powazski Cemetery was attended not only by his friends, musical associates and fellow artists, but by hordes of grieving fans who, like them, regretted the untimely passing of a performer unanimously celebrated as being a rare, inspiring and supremely gifted musical genius.  

 

Perhaps his greatest memorial, beside the hours of provocative and intriguing music he left behind, was the Jazz Festival named in his honour in 1995 which continues to incorporate an International Composer's Competition designed to discover and promote emerging young talent.  This seems a fitting tribute to a musician whose career began in obscurity at small private parties in post-war Krakow and eventually came to epitomize everything that continues to make European and especially Polish jazz so consistently fascinating.

 

 

KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA
c 1967

 

 

Use the links below to read more about the life and work of KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA and read reviews of his music (in English) on the excellent jazz blog POLISH JAZZ:

 

 

 

http://www.krzysztofkomeda.com/index.htm

 

 

http://polish-jazz.blogspot.com.au/search/label/Komeda%20Krzysztof

 

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

 

 

 

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Last updated 2 October 2021 § 

 

Some Books About… FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849

Before reading this post, you may like to take a few minutes to listen to Nocturne No. 16 in E Flat, Opus 55, No. 2 by Frédéric Chopin performed by my favourite interpreter of his music, the 'other' Polish (and for a time Australian) genius IGNAZ FRIEDMAN.

Nocturne No. 16 in E Flat, Opus 55, No. 2

Performed by  

IGNAZ FRIEDMAN 

(Recorded December 1936) 

 



 

Dover Publications, 1988

 

Chopin's Letters (1931) Collected by HENRYK OPIENSKI and translated, with a preface and editorial notes, by EL VOYNICH     

Reading the letters of any great artist can be a mixed blessing.  While examining their correspondence can be a rewarding and even valuable experience in some respects –– showing you how their minds worked and how some of their greatest works were conceived, created and even directly influenced by what occurred in their daily lives –– it can also be a disillusioning pleasure, a case of 'too much information' which can often leave you feeling that some things are, as they say, best left to the imagination.

A book like Chopin's Letters falls somewhere between these two extremes.  Chopin was indisputably a genius, but he was also a vain, imperious, chronically unhealthy, self-centered, opinionated and, on occasion, staggeringly selfish human being who was not averse to treating his closest friends like doltish servants.  If, like me, you revere the composer and his music then reading his letters may upset and disillusion you.  On the other hand, it can be refreshing, even inspiring in a different sort of way to learn that Chopin was a bit of a prig who bossed people round like a Sergeant-Major and could be wickedly funny at the expense of those he dismissed as fools or, worse, talentless pretenders.  It seems to bring him closer to us as a person, making him a more accessible, more sympathetic figure than the somewhat remote 'Romantic genius' whose most famous portrait (painted by his friend Eugène Delacroix) adorns the cover of this collection. 

'Even if I could fall in love with someone, as I should be glad to do,' he wrote to his friend Wojciech Grzymala from London on 21 October 1848, 'still I would not marry, for we should have nothing to eat and nowhere to live.  And a rich woman expects a rich man, or if a poor man, at least not a sickly one, but one who is young and handsome.  It's bad enough to go to pieces alone, but two together, that is the greatest misfortune.  I may peg out in a hospital, but I won't leave a starving wife behind me.'  These are less the words of a divinely-inspired genius than those of a man who was intimately familiar with the damage that years of illness and unrelieved mental and physical anguish can wreak upon frail human flesh.  Unlike most of us, however, Chopin discovered a way to transform his suffering into the highest form of art.  But perhaps the most affecting words of all are the last he scribbled down only a day or two before he died:  'As this cough will choke me, I implore you to have my body opened, so that I may not be buried alive.'  His father had been terrified of the same thing — a fear that had clearly been passed on to his son.   

Chopin's Letters was last reprinted by the Dover Press in 1988 and may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider. 



   

Abacus UK/Time Warner Books, 2003

 

Chopin's Funeral (2003) by BENITA EISLER  

Anybody interested in separating the realities of Chopin's life and personality from the romantic myths which all but engulfed him following his death (at the age of thirty-nine, from a still undiagnosed disease which could have been tuberculosis of the larynx, cystic fibrosis, miral centosis or a rare viral infection) should immediately seek out a copy of Chopin's Funeral.  The book's opening chapter –– which cleverly contrasts the facts of Chopin's life and his status as 'The Tragic Romantic Genius' with the events leading up to and inspired by his self-planned Paris funeral in October 1849 –– is nothing less than a biographical tour de force, with Eisler doing a superb job of revealing that the composer was, in fact, the publicity savvy 'spin doctor' of his day, a performer capable of provoking universal grief in the hearts of wealthy Parisians and commoners (a segment of society he neither trusted nor respected) alike even though few of them were personally acquainted with him and, at the time of his demise, were even less familiar with his music.     

Chopin's funeral was anything but a straightforward religious farewell ceremony.  It was a kind of populist theatrical event, stage-managed by him from beyond the grave to create the maximum amount of emotional and social impact and ensure that his name would not be quickly or easily forgotten.  What makes this all the more astonishing is that the composer had only been living in Paris since 1831 and had suffered something of a downturn in his career following the breakdown of his widely-publicized relationship with the novelist George Sand (the pseudonym of Amantine Aurore Lucile Dudevant, née Dupin).  Estranged from Sand, he died alone and nearly penniless (albeit in a luxury apartment in one of the better neighborhoods of Paris paid for, in large part, by a wealthy Scottish ex-pupil of his named Jane Stirling) in the arms of Sand's daughter Solange –– a woman who had also fallen out of favour with her famously 'libertarian' mother for marrying a man she didn't approve of and for being, frankly, a bit of a tart.   

Aware since adolescence –– the time when his symptoms first revealed themselves, as did the knowledge that his illness was incurable –– that he was doomed to die young, Chopin took advantage of his long wait for the Grim Reaper to plan out every detail of his funeral in advance, including what music (much of it his own) should be played during it and exactly which artists should be engaged to perform it.  He insisted, for example, that Pauline Viardot –– a close friend and the most renowned operatic diva of her time –– should sing Mozart's Requiem at the ceremony even though she was obliged to do so behind a black velvet curtain to conform to an archaic Parisian law which forbade women from singing in public in any city church.  In demonstrating that his funeral was, in a social sense, one of the pivotal cultural events of the nineteenth century, Eisler also reveals that the cult of celebrity –– often perceived, erroneously, to be an exclusively modern phenomenon –– had already become a dynamic social force by the mid-1840s, capable of turning an obscure emigré pianist from Warsaw into an internationally mourned superstar.  The author also has a particular talent for explaining and contextualizing Chopin's often convoluted relationships with Sand and her children –– a fascinating, sometimes distressing subject which surely cries out for closer analysis in a book of its own. 

Chopin's Funeral may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider. 



   

DaCapo Press, 2000

 

Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer (1998) by TAD SZULC   

This is another essential biography of Chopin, written by a Polish/American New York Times journalist whose books (of which there are many) also include biographies of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul II.  It is a thoroughly researched, extremely readable study of the composer's post-Warsaw life, focusing on the eighteen years he spent living in (and artistically if not financially conquering) the French capital, and attempts to explain the appeal of his music in emotion-based laymen's terms rather than in the dry academic language employed by musicologists and some of his previous biographers.  The book is very much a personal voyage, an attempt by Szulc to understand an artist he always felt to be an 'elusive personage' despite having grown up in a household where his music was part of the furniture thanks to a piano playing grandfather (to whose memory the book is lovingly dedicated) who taught him to love Chopin's music at a very early age.      

The great advantage Szulc has over, say, Benita Eisler, is his ability to speak fluent Polish and explain tricky but crucial Polish concepts like 'zal' (pronounced more like 'jahl') –– defined by him as a word which 'conveys to the Polish ear and soul sadness, longing, nostalgia, regret, resignation, contrition, resentment, complaint, and even anger.  Zal therefore fits Chopin perfectly as a person,' he notes, 'as well as with reference to his music.  It is the common thread throughout his works.'  (Szulc refers to him as Frederyk throughout the book rather than using Frédéric, its gallicized equivalent.)  Like Eisler, he does a fine job of explaining Chopin's complicated and often stormy relationships –– not only with George Sand and her troubled and troublesome children, but with faithful Polish friends like Wojciech Grzymala and the cellist Julian Fontana, men upon whom he was almost entirely reliant following his arrival in Paris in the autumn of 1831 as a sickly obscure emigré.      

Szulc's discussion of the composer's personality is well-balanced and largely sympathetic, revealing him to be the supremely gifted but deeply unhappy, sexually conflicted, manically-depressed individual he undoubtedly was.  Unlike other biographers, he doesn't view Solange Clésinger as the 'second woman' in Chopin's life after her famous novelist mother.  He awards that honour to Jane Stirling, the Scottish noblewoman, six years Chopin's senior, who became his pupil in 1843 and probably remained in unrequited love with him until the day he died.  It was Jane Stirling who provided much of the money that allowed the composer to remain in his apartment on the Place Vendôme during his final illness and who efficiently and uncomplainingly cared for him despite his oft-repeated protests to other friends that she 'bored him to death.'  It's touches like these, which speak volumes about the man and his milieu, which make Chopin in Paris arguably the one Chopin biography every non-specialist music lover probably needs to own.    

Chopin in Paris may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.

 

Special thanks to those who take the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

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Last updated 14 October 2021 §